


Crowley's Names

by Philosopher_King



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-19
Updated: 2020-03-19
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:08:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23214547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Philosopher_King/pseuds/Philosopher_King
Summary: A couple of short vignettes originally posted on Tumblr, addressing the questions: what does the "J." stand for, and what was Crowley's name before he Fell?
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 38





	1. Just a J, Really

“Really, though, what does the J stand for?” Aziraphale asked over lunch one day. Not at the Ritz—they saved that for special occasions now; it wasn’t every day that they helped prevent the world from ending—but at a little hole-in-the-wall sushi restaurant they had stumbled across, the way Aziraphale had a knack for stumbling across such things. It was down the stairs below a bank building, the sign only in Japanese characters painted on the window; the kind of place you would normally only find if you were looking for it.

“Nothing,” Crowley said, too casually, and Aziraphale gave him a tight-lipped look that said _That shit doesn’t work on me anymore_ , except that Aziraphale wouldn’t say _shit_ , he’d probably say _poppycock_ or something equally eyeroll-inducing. “I couldn’t decide,” Crowley mumbled, which was true.

“Couldn’t decide? What were the options?”

“Er… Jacob, Joshua, and Jeremy-Bearimy.”

“And _what?”_

“Sorry, joke. Remind me to make you watch _The Good Place._ I think you’ll really like it, if you can get past the inaccuracies.”

“Er, right. Jacob and Joshua, then. Awfully Biblical, aren’t they?”

“Angel, I’m as Biblical as they come.”

“Touché.” He cleared his throat a little awkwardly. “Was Joshua for… the young man we both met?”

“Yeah.” Crowley’s voice cracked, and he took a hurried swig of Sancerre. “Shame he never got to see much of the world.”

“It was good of you to show him what you could.”

“ _Good_ of me? You’re praising me for tempting him?”

“You do seem to have a dangerous habit of doing the right thing.”

“And it’s gotten me into just as much trouble as I thought it would.”

Aziraphale tapped his fingers on the table thoughtfully before he pointed out, “Joshua means ‘God is salvation.’”

“Yeah, well. Hope springs eternal.”

“What, haven’t you abandoned it all?”

“Hadn’t been down there in a while when I changed the name. They get rid of it all for you, but it springs back if you give it half a chance.”

“You make it sound like hiring a fumigator, or going to a barber for a close shave.”

“I was thinking more of a Brazilian wax, but yeah.”

Aziraphale wasn’t sure he wanted to ask what that was. “Joshua or Jacob. Not Israel? ‘Wrestles with God’ seems very much your style.”

“Including my interior decorating style?” Crowley said with a wicked, toothy grin, enjoying the charming pink blush that spread over Aziraphale’s (literally) cherubic cheeks. “Nah, I preferred Jacob the trickster, before he got all self-important. Being given a special new name by an angel will do that to a guy. That wasn’t you, was it?”

“Certainly not! No, that was far above my… above my pay grade, as you might say.”

“Look at you, you even got that one right!” Crowley congratulated him, and Aziraphale looked very pleased with himself.

“Not ‘wrestles with God,’ then, but ‘grasps by the heel.’”

“ _That’s_ more my style, honestly.” Crowley paused. “Or ‘God is a heel.’”

“Crowley!” Aziraphale glanced upward but stopped himself from asking aloud for forgiveness; Crowley never reacted well. “It can’t possibly mean that.”

“It’s just as linguistically sound as any other story in the Bible about what a name means.”

“You’re—”

“Incorrigible?” He swirled his wine around, looking very pleased with himself. “Job description, love.”

Aziraphale felt himself blushing again; he couldn’t help it when Crowley let slip an endearment (other than ‘angel,’ which hardly counted). “I was going to say ‘hopeless,’ but it turns out you’re not.”

“I guess I’m letting it grow out.”

Aziraphale smiled and raised his glass slightly. “It looks good on you.”


	2. Questions

“Do you remember anything? From… from before?”

Aziraphale had never dared to ask the question in all their centuries of easy-uneasy friendship. Even now, he might not have dared to ask it if they weren’t lying in the dark, Crowley’s head pillowed on Aziraphale’s chest, his fingers playing lazily through the demon’s long loose curls, both of them soft with pleasant tiredness and the hormones and neurotransmitters that their human-like bodies insisted on producing, despite the fact that their owners certainly did not need them.

They didn’t need to breathe, either, any more than they needed to eat or needed their hearts to pump blood, but their bodies did it anyway, as a sort of default setting, the way they produced oxytocin, dopamine, and adrenaline. So Aziraphale noticed when Crowley’s slow contented breathing caught and stilled.

 _Stupid angel,_ he started thinking immediately, _now you’ve done it_. _He hasn’t wanted to talk about it in 6000 years, why would that change just because you’ve started—canoodling…_

But Aziraphale only got about two seconds into his spiral of self-rebuke before Crowley answered softly: “I remember everything.”

It was Aziraphale’s turn to catch his breath. There were so many things he was desperate to know… or so he had thought. Now that the knowledge was within reach, did he really want to lose the mysteries, to close off all those gleaming possibilities?

“What were you like, as an angel?” Aziraphale asked hesitantly. His voice sounded very small, shaky, embarrassingly higher in pitch than usual.

“Not that much different than I am now,” Crowley said. “Less cynical, though. And less… wiggly.” There was a bit of a smirk in his voice, a halfhearted attempt to sound casual and cavalier, but he mostly sounded sad.

“So… if I had met you before, I would have recognized you.” Aziraphale tried not to sound disappointed.

“Unless they wiped your memories, yeah. But I didn’t recognize you, so…”

“We probably never met.”

“Not sure why we would have. Different departments, weren’t we? You were… security, I was an engineer.” He paused. “S’pose I still am… or was, until very recently.”

“The M25,” Aziraphale said knowingly.

“Bit of a comedown, though, isn’t it? From galaxies and nebulae to cursed motorways.”

“You engineered the Fall of man,” Aziraphale offered helpfully.

Crowley snorted. “Given that three-fifths of engineering is throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks, sure.”

They both fell silent for a time. Aziraphale resumed stroking Crowley’s hair, doing what little he could to soothe the pain he had reawakened.

Crowley was the first to speak again. “You wanted to know if we could have met in Heaven before the War.”

“Silly, isn’t it? I don’t know why I thought…”

“No, I get it. It would make the whole thing seem less… random. Star-crossed lovers tragically parted, reunited against all odds because they were destined to be together…”

“You make me sound like such a hopeless sap,” Aziraphale protested.

“Well, you are, aren’t you? A hopeless sap who’s read too many 19th-century novels. And I love you for it.”

Aziraphale felt himself blushing in the dark (another irritating and completely unnecessary habit of human bodies). “What else was I to do, when you spent the century napping?”

“You mean other than learn the gavotte and seduce Oscar Wilde?”

Aziraphale’s cheeks grew even hotter. “That wasn’t until… later.” After their fight. After Crowley woke up from an unexplained decades-long hibernation, sent a message asking Aziraphale to meet for the first time in 60 years, and proceeded to ask for the one thing that could destroy him permanently. Then, when Aziraphale (obviously!) refused, he ran off to God-knows-where, and Aziraphale had no way of knowing whether he was even alive until he turned up 80 years later to sweep heroically to the rescue once again, as if nothing had changed except that he had tacked on a couple more names…

“Do you mind if I ask— and you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to…”

“Spit it out, angel,” Crowley drawled with good-natured amusement.

“What was— what was your name, before? I understand if you don’t want to say it, I know all about ‘dead-naming,’ and forgive me if I’ve overstepped—”

“Caralael.” The accent was on the second syllable, the first vowel reduced almost to nothing.

“Oh.”

“Yes. ‘Crawly’ was a nickname. A cruel one, intended to mock.”

“But you kept it anyway.”

“More or less, yeah.”

“Why?”

“Because of what my old name means.” It was an invitation to Aziraphale: _You know Hebrew; figure it out._

“Caralael,” he murmured. “Spelled with a quph?”

“Mm-hm.”

“‘He cried to God.’”

“Yes.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” Aziraphale said apologetically.

Crowley fell silent again, and Aziraphale feared once more that he had offended him. But after a few moments he took a long breath and said heavily: “I never fought in the War, you know. I never wanted to overthrow God and take over, or install Lucifer in Her place. I never stopped loving Her. But I had questions.”

Aziraphale wasn’t sure whether Crowley’s statement should be understood as framed from the past—that he never stopped loving Her before he Fell—or from the present: _“I love Her even now.”_ But he knew that was a question he couldn’t ask. So instead he asked, “Questions? What questions?”

“About Her Plan for creation. Especially for the humans—they were central to the Plan from very early on. And as an engineer, I had access to some of her plans. Just bits and pieces, mind, but enough to raise doubts, which Lucifer was only too happy to prod at.”

Aziraphale still felt cold and slightly nauseous at the thought of putting _doubt_ and _God_ in the same sentence; they both knew too well the fate of those who did. “Doubts about what?” he asked, fighting his panicked urge to change the subject immediately.

“Why she was making them mortal, so they would have to watch their loved ones die. Why she was planning to give them free will when odds were they would misuse it. Why she was putting them in a tiny garden and making a whole world of beauty and wonder that they would never see.”

“I suppose you were the answer to that last one,” Aziraphale ventured with a shaky laugh.

“Ironic, innit? Anyway, Lucifer encouraged me to go to Her with my questions.”

Aziraphale’s jaw dropped. “You could just… go up to the Throne and ask?”

“Things were different then, I guess.”

“Not if you were just _‘security._ ’”

“Aw, angel, I didn’t mean—”

“No, you’re right. It’s why we would never have met back then.” He tried not to sound too bitter.

“Maybe it’s lucky I listened to Lucifer, then.” Crowley tilted his head back to look at his angel. Aziraphale could see nothing but his yellow eyes gleaming in the dark, but he knew Crowley could see perfectly well all the emotions that passed over his face in quick succession: shock, disbelief, perverse pride, fierce possessiveness.

“You can’t possibly mean that,” Aziraphale protested weakly.

“I can mean whatever the Heaven I want. You’re not the boss of me.”

“Oh, nonsense. You know I am.”

“Can’t get anything past you, can I?” Crowley said with a flash of pointed canines.

Aziraphale patted his head fondly, then sobered. “What did She say when you asked your questions?”

Crowley’s smile faded and he lowered his head again. “‘So you think you can make the world better than I can?’ She seemed… irritated, rather than properly angry. ‘No, of course not,’ I said. ‘I only want to understand.’ ‘You will,’ she said. ‘And you’ll play your part.’ And that was all.”

“She didn’t cast you out right then?”

“No. I wasn’t satisfied, but I thought I’d be all right. I told Lucifer what she’d said and he tried to use my disappointment to convince me to join his rebellion. I passed, but I didn’t rejoin Heaven’s hosts, either. When the War started, I hid, like the fucking coward I am.”

“Oh, my dear. You weren’t a coward; you were a… a conscientious objector. Just like me, this last time.”

“Then how do you explain the Alpha Centauri thing?”

“You wouldn’t really have gone.”

“Not without you,” Crowley agreed, and Aziraphale felt pride and love swelling warm in his chest again, making his optional breathing more difficult (though that might just have been Crowley’s shoulder pressing on his sternum). 

“Anyway, it did me no good,” Crowley continued. “You can hide from Lucifer and Michael, but you can’t hide from God. I found myself boiling in sulphur with the rest of them. And let me tell you, they never let me forget that I didn’t fight with them. They made clear that I’d have to make it up in a really spectacular way… and in the end, I did. I played my part, just like She said I would.”

“And you think your questions were the reason you Fell, not your… conscientious objector status?”

“I’m as sure of it as I am of anything. ‘You’ll play your part’: She knew what She would do, and what I would do, as soon as I voiced my doubts about the humans.”

“But if that’s true… why wouldn’t she have known it even before? Why would you have had a choice to ask or not, if you didn’t really have a choice about the apple business?”

Crowley didn’t respond right away. If Aziraphale’s pointless heartbeat seemed unbearably loud to him, he could only imagine how it sounded to Crowley, with his ear right on top of it.

“D’you think that’s why she named me what she did?” Crowley asked after what felt like about a quarter of an eternity.

“Hard to say,” Aziraphale said with a hesitant smile. “Her ways are notoriously…”

“…ineffable?” Crowley filled in with an air of resignation.

“I was going to say ‘mysterious.’”

“Of course you were.”

“Would it make you feel better, or worse?”

“What?”

“Knowing that she gave you that name because you would ask questions… with all that entails.”

“Hmm.” Crowley paused to consider. “Makes me feel even more like a hamster on a wheel than I usually do… but I got off easier than some. This is the God that drowned a whole country, flame-broiled a couple cities, and had Her own son tortured to death to make a point when She could have just forgiven the debt without the whole song and dance if She wanted to. Oh, unclench, angel, you won’t Fall just from listening to me.”

“But what if I…” Aziraphale began in a small voice, then brought himself up short.

“…agree? Ah. Well.” He turned his head so that he was looking straight up at the ceiling. “You leave him alone, you hear?” he barked. “Don’t make me come up there. Again.”

“Crowley! Shhh!”

“What? ‘He shouted at God’ is as good a translation as any. ‘He had a sharp word with God.’”

“You’re terrible.”

“Damn right I am.”


End file.
